By Charles Mathews. Marketing leaders are under pressure to show how marketing drives financial productivity — or risk losing budget, credibility, and influence. In this two-part series, industry experts unpack the metrics that truly resonate with CFOs and explain how CMOs can bridge the language gap to better align with the rest of the C-suite.
Speak the CFO’s language
“When you sit in a C-suite conversation, you quickly realise that the usual media vanity metrics are not the language of a CFO [chief financial officer]. They want evidence that marketing is driving financial productivity,” says Scott Reinders, chief operating officer of Connect, part of the Up&Up Group.
Three metrics consistently bridge this communication gap. “Cost per acquisition (CPA) is simple, comparable, and commercial. CPA lets you link media directly to a unit of business value. When framed properly within the full journey, it also stops the last-click bias because you can show the blended cost of getting someone from awareness to action,” Reinders says.
Return on advertising spend translates investment into revenue. “CFOs respond well when ROAS is split into short-term ROAS and predictive ROAS. The second piece shows how upper-funnel activity contributes to customer value even if it is not attributed to last-click performance,” says Reinders.
Measuring marketing’s contribution to profits
For CFOs, the question is: what revenue would not have happened without marketing? “Incrementality proves causality. Instead of debating attribution models, incrementality testing shows the revenue that would not have happened without the advertising activity. It is one of the cleanest ways to bridge the gap between marketing and finance,” Reinders says.
The framing matters as much as the metrics themselves. “The trick is to anchor these inside the marketing funnel and the real journey a customer takes. You cannot optimise a single metric in isolation. Reach and attention set the conditions for demand. Mid-funnel signals like engaged views, completed videos, and quality traffic show growing intent. Lower-funnel outcomes show the commercial payoff. When the C-suite sees this narrative, you shift the conversation from isolated data points to proof of how marketing grows the business,” says Reinders.
“Ultimately, we should be aiming to measure ROI or ROAS. Your CFO wants to know if the rands spent have been effective. Your media metrics then need to be identified based on what effective means to your business. This is dependent on your objectives and the nature of your business. If we want our CFOs to take marketing seriously, we need to shift the conversation,” says Isla Prentis, managing director of Marketing Intelligence Hub.
Value what matters most
For Ryan Sauer, chief executive of Redwood Analytics, what matters most is ARPU: “Average Revenue Per User — we measure visitors and we measure sales and revenue from leads and ecommerce, but rarely do we have a value of each user on an application, website, or loyalty programme. Say it with me: ARPU.”
Unique reach provides credibility that inflated numbers destroy. “If you can tell a CFO how many ‘new new’ people saw your brand message and offering and, with high confidence, how many times they saw it, and not some ridiculous number like ’45 million South Africans reached’, then they might believe your marketing metrics,” Sauer notes.
But the fundamental requirement transcends specific metrics. “A CFO will love any metric you can explain as part of your marketing performance measurement that is linked to a business goal. If you understand how it impacts the business, they will love it,” says Sauer.
Clearly prove cause and effect
“CFOs understand incrementality. If the CFO can see a direct line of causation from brand investment and consideration to sales, they’d have a lot more confidence in marketing and recognise it as a legitimate tool for growth. Secondly, all of marketing and finance need to understand the time lag. The impact of the brand takes a long time. When CFOs understand this time lag, they become less impatient. They ask less tactical marketing questions and more strategic marketing questions,” says Neil Pursey, product manager and board member at Maaten.
Pursey advocates for excess share of voice as a leading metric. “It still works, but not in a vacuum. It needs to be across media channels, and it occurs when a brand’s share of voice — how much it’s talked about or advertised — is greater than its share of market,” he says.
Brand search serves as a countermeasure. “To measure the effectiveness of ESOV (excess share of voice), measuring brand search as a lag metric is key. This is important as a countermeasure because a brand can have high ESOV but not be effective because of poor creative or poor media targeting,” Pursey says.
CFOs shouldn’t wag the dog’s tail
“I think the most important acronym that marketers and agencies are facing today is iROAS. Incremental return on advertising spend. Everyone wants to know that they spent R1 and got R5 back. And a new R5. Add to that other metrics like CAC, and, of course, the marginal cost of growth. How much profit did marketing produce? But I think there is a bigger problem beyond these metrics. Marketing is being held to account in this in a way that I believe is unnatural. Every campaign needs to drive sales and prove it did. I think it is a product of the pervasive short-termism in the global industry. Living ‘quarter by quarter’. This might be a massively contentious thing to say, but I don’t think the CFO should set the main metric we all run after,” says Chris Botha, group managing director at Park Advertising.
The persistent tension between brand building and direct-response performance reflects measurement systems designed for silos rather than integration. And the most sophisticated approaches recognise both as essential components of business value creation.
“The long game of brand building and the short game of performance need to work together, not fight each other. The most sophisticated approach is a simple one: a full-funnel model that tracks both mental availability and commercial yield. Brand building works over time by expanding future demand. Performance should harvest that demand. You need a model that can show both sides of this equation,” Reinders says.
Building longer-term growth
Three tools guide integration. “Share of Search is one of the strongest proxies for brand interest and has predictive power for future market share. It is cheap, fast, and easy for CMOs to track monthly. Incremental lift models show how upper-funnel work influences lower-funnel conversion rates over time. This prevents over-investment in short-term tactics that erode long-term growth,” says Reinders.
👉 Read more: SA research shows the correlation between Share of Search and market share (May 2025)
The framework requires measuring different dimensions of value. “Avinash Kaushik’s Brand Measurement Framework talks about moving from single-channel click-driven thinking to full customer value systems. His structure pushes CMOs to measure profitability, not just conversion; customer quality, not just volume; customer lifetime value, not just the first purchase; the entire customer journey, not a channel silo. This type of model lets CMOs prove that brand investment is not a cost. It is an accelerator for cheaper, higher-quality acquisition later. Performance then becomes more efficient because the brand has already done the heavy lifting,” Reinders says.
Prentis emphasises the different timeframes involved. “There isn’t a single measure that can capture everything. Not even neat sales measures will do this. We need to remember that brand-building measurement is intangible and takes time. There are many equity trackers available, each composed of a different set of measures weighted into an equity score. What you need to aim for is identifying a tracker that aligns with the nature of your business and marketing approach. And then most importantly, track it consistently over time. Performance is measured in real-time with tangible KPIs such as leads, conversions, or sales,” she says.
End of Part 1.
Part 2 will explore attention metrics, premium media value, unified dashboards, and the road ahead for modern CMOs. Subscribe for free to receive the second part in your inbox.
